The VVDS data-reduction pipeline:: Introducing VIPGI, the VIMOS interactive pipeline and graphical interface

The VIMOS VLT Deep Survey (VVDS), designed to measure 150,000 galaxy redshifts, requires a dedicated data reduction and analysis pipeline to process in a timely fashion the large amount of spectroscopic data being produced. This requirement has lead to the development of the VIMOS Interactive Pipeline and Graphical Interface (VIPGI), a new software package designed to simplify to a very high degree the task of reducing astronomical data obtained with VIMOS ( Visible Multi - Object Spectrograph), the imaging spectrograph built by the VIRMOS Consortium for the European Southern Observatory and mounted on Unit 3 (Melipal) of the VLT ( Very Large Telescope) at Paranal Observatory ( Chile). VIPGI provides the astronomer with specially designed VIMOS data-reduction functions, a VIMOS-centric data organizer, and dedicated data browsing and plotting tools, which can be used to verify the quality and accuracy of the various stages of the data-reduction process. The quality and accuracy of the data-reduction pipeline are comparable to those obtained using well-known IRAF tasks, but the speed of the data-reduction process is significantly increased, because of the dedicated nature of VIPGI. In this paper we discuss the details of the multiobject spectroscopy (MOS) data-reduction pipeline that has been implemented in VIPGI, as applied to the reduction of some 20,000 VVDS spectra, quantitatively assessing the accuracy of the various reduction steps. We also provide a more general overview of VIPGI capabilities, a tool that can be used for the reduction of any kind of VIMOS data.